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Search in Book Reviews

The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review.
The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers.
Currently there are 1918 reviews in the database and more every month.
Search is a simple string search in either book title or book author. The full text search
is a search of the text of the review.

Months from now a more detailed review will be posted on the ACCU book
reviews web site. This brief review is presented now to answer the
question "Should I buy this book?".

"Should I buy this book?" Well, if you are a learner programmer or
someone who wants to brush up their C++ skills, this is the book for
you. It's not perfect but it is a very good book for beginners. Once you
have mastered this book then you should consider buying "Accelerated C++ "
(Koenig& Moo) or the "C++ Primer" by Lippman& Lajoie. After that
then try "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup. Take a look
at

www.wileyeurope.com/go/ glassborow

or

www.spellen.org/
youcandoit/

for more information.

YCDI! Is a book that will take months to read. It took months to
review. It is split into chapters but should have been split up into
parts. The first set of chapters provide intense study material and the
remainder of the book continues at a gentler pace.

The approach taken by the author (Francis Glassborow, aka fgw) is to
explain matters and then provide exercises to confirm that the reader
has assimilated the subject material. Fgw thinks that programming is fun
and provides tools and libraries (Using the MingW port of the Gnu C/C++
compiler and the Quincy IDE on the accompanying CD) so that the beginner
can produce rapid results, boosting the student's morale. The library
that comes with this book is called "playpen" and provides a canvas to
display things on - this is good because it means that beginners gets
something visual to look at early on in their career.

Flaws. One is the lack of Linux support - the book demands access
to a Windows PC. This is a disappointment because I have seen plenty
of messages on Linux mailing lists looking for help in learning to
program. The other flaw is lack of information in using an interactive
debugger. Another flaw is that fgw insists on pulling all the standard
library names into the global namespace - the "using namespace std"
command is an aberration and should not appear in a programming book. It
is one of the few places where fgw provides bad code that has to be
unlearnt later.

The book gives an authentic programming experience, the reader has
to dig for certain details to get things going. If you are a complete
beginner (with no one to help you) then I would suggest you join the